The Ploughboy

CHAPTER VIfrom The Story of My Boyhood and Youthby John Muir 1913

Even when sick we were held to our tasks as long as we could stand. Once in harvest-time
I had the mumps and was unable to swallow any food except milk, but this was not allowed to
make any difference, while I staggered with weakness and sometimes fell headlong among the
sheaves. Only once was I allowed to leave the harvest-field--when I was stricken down with
pneumonia. I lay gasping for weeks, but the Scotch are hard to kill and I pulled through.
No physician was called, for father was an enthusiast and always said and believed that God
and hard work were by far the best doctors.

We were all made slaves through the vice of over-industry.... It often seemed to me that
our fierce, over-industrious way of getting the grain from the ground was too closely connected
with gravedigging. The staff of life, naturally beautiful, oftentimes suggested the grave-digger's
spade. Men and boys, and in those days even women and girls, were cut down while cutting the
wheat. The fat folk grew lean and the lean leaner, while the rosy cheeks brought from Scotland
and other cool countries across the sea faded to yellow like the wheat. . . We were called
in the morning at four o'clock and seldom got to bed before nine, making a broiling, seething
day seventeen hours long loaded with heavy work, while I was only a small stunted boy; and
a few years later my brothers David and Daniel and my older sisters had to endure about as
much as I did. In the harvest dog-days and dog-nights and dog-mornings, when we arose from
our clammy beds, our cotton shirts clung to our backs as wet with sweat as the bathing-suits
of swimmers, and remained so all the long, sweltering days.